Lady Hamilton

From the candle-smoked gambling dens of Naples to the salt-sprayed quarterdecks at Trafalgar, a blacksmith’s daughter re-writes the geometry of power: Emma Lyon, clay in her native Cheshire, marble once George Romney’s brush baptises her, and gunpowder once Horatio Nelson’s gaze detonates her. The film, a feverish Rococo phantasmagoria, charts her mutation through strata of 18th-century spectacle—first as quivering mistress to doddering Sir William Hamilton, British envoy to a fermenting Kingdom of Naples; then as political puppet dangling between Bourbon courts and revolutionary street mobs; finally as England’s uncrowned queen, the Admiralty’s secret weapon, the lover who trades her body for battleships and her tears for broadsides. Shot in Weimar Berlin on the eve of its own collapse, the narrative cross-fades biography into apocalypse: marble staircases crack like brittle vows, Vesuvius coughs ash that lands like gossip on white-wigged shoulders, and every waltz is scored by distant cannon. Conrad Veidt’s Nelson, half-spectral, half-satyr, limps through salons with a carnal hunger equal parts Christ and corsair; his single arm, slung around Liane Haid’s Emma, becomes the axis on which Europe pivots. When the Nile roars and Copenhagen burns, the film cuts not to ships but to Emma’s pupil dilating—an empire measured in irises. Bankruptcy, yellowed pamphlets, a child’s corpse in a Calais inn: the epilogue strips gilt from legend until only nerve and nightmare remain, a premonition of fascist Europe already germinating in 1921.